Automation of claiming property held by government
Hey hackers,
I am looking to see if anyone would subscribe to my service. I have built the prototype for fun, but to take it to market I would like to see if anyone would actually pay for it.
Situation: 1 in 10 people have unclaimed property held by the government (US). My home state, MA, has $3 billion worth. All states have a website where you search their database, find your name, and give them a bunch of information to prove your identity so they can send you what you are owed. The process can take between 30 min to 1 hour. When you have unclaimed property again, you have to go through that process again.
My question: Would you pay me to do this process for you? If I get a website up and running with this service, would YOU actually visit this website and pay for it? Having a somewhat guaranteed amount of users prior to finishing this would definitely help with motivation.
Since the process is fully automated with headless browsing, I would not charge more than a few dollars a year to check your name in your state's database every single day, and send you your unclaimed property whenever you have some.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I've never heard of this before. I think you might need to educate potential users of how or why this even happens, because I can't think of any reason I might have unclaimed properties. You want people to know, "who is this for?"
If I can't tell who it's for, then it's useless to ask me if I'd pay to use it.
So who tends to qualify? And what do they do right now instead?
Thanks Wil for your reply,
Anyone really can have unclaimed property (probably except for young children). Unclaimed property is the result of you doing business with a company and them owing you money for any reason. They have no incentive to give you back your money since that takes time and effort, but they are not allowed to just keep it so the US government requires that they send the money to the state to hold onto for safe keeping. For example, my bank owed me $9 for god knows why. My mom was owed $22 from Barnes and Nobel. My neighbor was owed $90 from Comcast. All this money was held in the MA treasury department. States use unclaimed property websites right now as their current solution to get people their money back.
If you are from the US, search your state + "unclaimed property" and then go to the first website presented. Plug in your name on the website and see if you are there.
I am from MA, so I go findmassmoney.com and click on "search unclaimed property" and type my name and click search.
Thoughts?
Yeah, if this really is the case that's quite interesting. Seems like a mostly legal problem to solve though (e.g. you could probably build a software product around this but I expect you'll have to go through some expensive lawyer-ing hoops to get it up and running).
N/A for me though, because I probably classify as "a young child" haha.